Age· The columns of time
Palaeolithic
315 ka → 11.7 ka
Three hundred thousand years in which stone was shaped only by breaking it, and in which nothing that a modern reader would call an institution existed. It is by far the longest band on this timeline, and the one that makes all the others legible: everything since farming fits in the thin strip at its right.
What the evidence shows
The name means old stone, and it names a technique before it names a time: stone worked by removing flakes, not by grinding it smooth. Read as a proportion, this band is the most useful thing the timeline shows. From 315,000 to 11,726 years ago it holds roughly 96% of the existence of Homo sapiens. Farming, cities, writing, engines, everything a history book is about, occupy the remaining 4%. That is why the right-hand end of the timeline is crowded to the point of illegibility while the rest looks empty: the emptiness is the accurate part.
Bounds and conventions
The word was invented in nineteenth-century Europe and it travels badly. African archaeologists divide the same span into Early, Middle and Later Stone Age, on criteria of their own, and the two vocabularies overlap without ever quite coinciding. The timeline uses the European names because it needs one continuous ruler from end to end. That is a convenience of drawing, not a claim about the past, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are reading.
96 per cent of the history of the species. It opens with the oldest direct association of H. sapiens fossils and a Middle Stone Age industry.
Sources
- Richter, D., Grün, R., Joannes-Boyau, R., et al. (2017). The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age. Nature 546, 293–296.
- Bar-Yosef, O. (2002). The Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 363-393.
- Scarre, C. (dir.) (2018). The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, 4e éd. Thames & Hudson.